Your display is a battlefield where software makers – web developers in particular – wage battles for screen real estate. It’s a never-ending fight between web creators struggling to cram up as much content on your screen as possible and end-users who view web pages on a wide variety of devices, screen resolutions, and aspect ratios. Every pixel counts but finding the middle ground is a gargantuan task that only a few web developers accomplish successfully.

Enter Google Browser Size, a simple and free online tool that helps web developers take browser sizes into account when designing web pages. A Google Browser Size team member Arthur Blume revealed that Bruno Bowden with the Google Earth team first got the idea for the project noticing that many people who visit the “Download Google Earth” page never actually download the software.

This has led Bowden to suspect that a significant number of users might have their browser windows too small to see the download button. A detailed analysis confirmed Bruno’s hunch – 10 percent of users couldn’t see the download button without scrolling. Both men then decided to make a free page visualization tool that would benefit other designers faced with the same dilemma:

We constructed a page that could overlay a DIV containing the contour visualization atop an IFRAME containing any other Web page. This turned out to be a good way to see which controls were and weren’t visible at typical browser sizes.

The Browser Size tool is a Google Labs service available at browsersize.googlelabs.com. Simply enter a desired URL to have the visualization guidelines rendered atop your web page, like the Geek.com site in the image below. The overlay outlines parts of the page that are visible at multiple screen width and height settings, in addition to percentages of visitors that will see the outlined regions. Google said the size overlay is using latest data from visitors to google.com.